Anthropic wants to hire a New Yorker-caliber editor.
“Spiritually, this role is New York, not San Francisco.”
Good afternoon, everyone.
About 1/3 of the people dining at Balthazar last night had goblets of Balthazar Frose on the table. It was a little early in the week for me, but the woman across from me eating French onion soup and sipping on frosty blended wine and strawberries looked awfully happy.
Today in Feed Me: How an ice cream brand’s homemade Instagram feed captured my attention, Anthropic is looking for a New Yorker-level editor, Hailey Bieber’s new job at Gap, and X wants hot girls to post photos on their platform.
More from Feed Me:
While scrolling on Instagram the other night, my thumb stopped on a felt flyer for an ice cream company called PomPom. Unlike other New York ice cream brands that have caught my attention through brand and chef collabs, PomPom hooked me in on their approach to marketing.
I got in touch with Shirah, the founder of PomPom, to learn more about her path from Ralph Lauren to health coach to ice cream maker. Right now, the ice cream — organic, natural plant-based whole food ingredients, without refined sugar, gluten, soy, nuts (mostly), gums, emulsifiers, stabilizers, or artificial colors/flavors — is made in small batches, and scooped out of a roving cart around Brooklyn.
Shirah told me about her former career in fashion, plans for pop-ups (Spiral Books!) and her daughter, Olivia, who is a RISD grad who makes all kinds of fantastic objects with felt.
How did you learn to make ice cream and why did you start PomPom?
Like with so many other stories, Pom Pom (the very early seeds of it) was something I began working on during the pandemic, when I had an unprecedented amount of time on my hands. I’d been put on furlough from my job at Ralph Lauren, where I’d worked for 13 years, and took the opportunity to do an online program to become a holistic health coach. I have an autoimmune disease, and am passionate about helping other people learn how to manage illness through diet and lifestyle. My other passion has always been baking, I did it professionally for a bit. These two interests sort of melded and flourished in the void that was left by my joblessness, and transformed into a purpose to bring something into the world that didn’t exist — something that makes people happy, and that also shows people that eating healthy and being happy are not mutually exclusive. I have a long list of dietary restrictions due to health issues, and could never find any vegan ice cream that wasn’t full of so much junk and sugar, so I became obsessed with making it. I got an ice cream machine and started experimenting, learning by trial and error. I also did a lot of reading about the science of ice cream making (it’s very scientific!)
What’s the most challenging part of hosting pop-ups? Where can people find your ice cream this summer?
Ice cream, specifically, is challenging in a pop-up situation because it melts. Figuring out how to keep it from melting while outside for hours in 85°+ weather is an ongoing pursuit. This summer, we’re popping up at our favorite cafe in Bed-Stuy, Rita & Maria. We’ll also be at Pilgrim Surf + Supply in Williamsburg at the end of August, and at the best children’s bookstore, Spiral Books, in September. There are a few other TBD dates, as well. We’ll post the details on IG!
“Gelateria-style, where the ice cream is made fresh every day, and the whole neighborhood — kids in their pajamas, dogs, everyone — gathers on summer evenings to hang out and chat and have a little treat before bed.”
I first discovered you from one of the flyers you posted on Instagram. The felt design was so lovely, and I figured someone with a strong sense of taste was behind the business. Can you talk a little bit about your approach to design and marketing the business?
Thank you :) I think beauty and art and design are very important, and that they should be integrated in everything, even an ice cream business. My approach to marketing is just authenticity, I guess. I don’t have any real strategy other than doing what resonates. I love natural materials and handmade crafts, so the design choices usually go in that direction. I’m very lucky because my older daughter, Olivia, is an amazing fiber artist. She has a felting business called For Play Lighting, but finds time to help me with making the felt flyers. I think they’re so beautiful. We have a great collaborative process where I tell her my vision and inspiration, and she interprets them in her own way. The fact that they’re made by my daughter makes the pieces so special to me. It also means I can be much more annoying and particular than I would ever be with any other designer.
What’s the long-term dream?
The dream is to open a little ice cream shop here in my area of Bed-Stuy, because we really need it. Gelateria-style, where the ice cream is made fresh every day, and the whole neighborhood — kids in their pajamas, dogs, everyone — gathers on summer evenings to hang out and chat and have a little treat before bed.
Posting and browsing on the Feed Me Job Board is free:
🥩 Content Creator & Video Strategist at Golden Steer ($95k)
🍳 Marketing Associate at Material Kitchen ($75k)
✍️ Technical Writer at Amca ($100k)
Anthropic is hiring a Standards Editor. The ideal person has strong opinions about how many times in one piece a colon should introduce an appositive. “Spiritually, this role is New York, not San Francisco.” Jake Eaton, an editor at Anthropic, posted on X that they’re looking for a comma queen. When I DM’d him asking what that meant, he replied with this story by Mary Norris (who worked at The New Yorker from 1978 to 2017). Anthropic’s editor salary is $265,000 - $295,000, which can pay for a very good editor. Maybe they can even get the Comma Queen herself out of retirement. Earlier this year, Notion, another AI company, hired New Yorker writer Adam Iscoe.
I’m feeling super bullish on brands like J.Crew and Merit, which are integrating illustration and collages into their marketing. In a sea of templatized graphics on Instagram and ChatGPT-generated images, there is such a satisfying element of surprise to handmade posts.
“I love being alive.” My friend Suze posted this over the weekend on X, along with photos from Sunset Beach on Shelter Island. What followed was a debate over whether women should be able to treat X like Instagram, with commentary from X’s head of product, Nikita Bier. An anon account Signull replied (now deleted) to Suze’s post saying “This is not Instagram.” Nikita then replied to Signull saying, “For the love of god, can we get a single woman on this app without an anon account attacking them?” My X feed is now full of beautiful women posting carousels of photos on X, also loving being alive. If you read between the lines, Nikita’s recent statements and algorithm changes suggest he wants to make X a safer and more fun place to post for your friends, mutuals, and like-minded accounts, without your comments getting hijacked by antagonistic accounts who found you through the algo… almost like how Twitter used to be before Musk bought it. You can read Nikita’s comments here in the context of this “friendlier algo” push, but like any of his experiments, we’ll see if it sticks
Brandon Tan has been named the Global Fashion Director of GQ. Tan, who spent the last two years at Cosmopolitan and Seventeen, after working as a fashion editor at GQ from 2022 to 2024, has also been a personal stylist for Sombr. Per BoF, “Tan succeeds Miles Pope, who left the position last month to join activewear maker Vuori as vice president of style, talent and activations creative.”
Charli XCX, have you considered posting on LinkedIn? The musician, who has been organizing smaller, more intimate conversations and shows over the last year, said, “truly believe anti marketing will become a thing soon… still marketing but it’s just a different approach, more intimate, personal, private, one on one. less about the projection of scale.” All of which is to say: the intimate strategy is still a strategy.
Alix Earle is wearing Emily Dawn Long on the cover of Time Magazine.
A magazine launch I care deeply about: The New England Review of Boats.
Hailey Bieber has added denim designer to her resume. There have been so many signs that the Gap team is on fire: bringing Byline co-founder Meg O’Sullivan onto their creative team, setting up a hoodie station at Coachella, and choosing novelist Madeline Cash as a model for a recent campaign. But it was really solidified when I met a man in Cannes last month who said his shirt was by “Richard Dickson.”
SO many companies doing stop-motion / scrapbooking on their social feed right now. I have a folder, obviously: https://www.are.na/elizabeth-goodspeed/social-scrapbook
Love what Shirah is doing at PomPom and was really excited to see she used Raaka in her ice creams. Wasn't able to make the pop-up this weekend but will not miss the next one.